7 Life-Saving Tips (To Remind You That Death Is Inescapable)

Even if you could alter your genes and not end up a comic book villain like The Lizard, 30 to 60 percent of cancers are apparently caused by plain, dumb luck. Even that fatal familial insomnia disease above has a non-genetic, completely random analog called sporadic fatal insomnia. That's medical jargon for "We have no idea why he suddenly stopped sleeping and died." I wonder what the comfortingly opaque technical term is for "We are the playthings of chance."

It turns out that knowing about the health risks of an activity has little to no effect on our ability to stop doing it. And it isn't us just being too weak to resist temptation when it's in front of us: We will actively pursue doing things that we know are bad for us with the tenacity of a drunken sophomore with his ex's phone number. When this country's government tried to prohibit people from drinking, in an era called The Stoppening, the country basically said, "Do we really need a government?" and gave all their money to hooch-pedaling gangsters. "People should stop drinking" is the only Constitutional amendment ever to be repealed completely. That happened because, given the choice between not drinking and empowering murderers who live by the law of the jungle, most people chose alcohol.

Library of Congress
"We're not pissed, and we're pissed!"

So, good luck changing your behavior to save your life. The odds are against you, and also, it very well may not matter.

Even if your genes aren't the problem per se, they may have caused you to be born into a group with greatly reduced life expectancy, like being a black male in the United States. Health tip: Do not be born into this group.

Or, you might just happen to be born into a time when a war is happening. More than 20 million citizens of the Soviet Union died during World War II because of a conflict between multiple abstract entities they had nothing to do with creating. If you were an able-bodied French man in 1913, you had a roughly 1 in 8 chance of being killed in World War I.

Paul Castelnau
Survivors had an 8 in 8 chance of dying later, because death is the most ruthless warlord of all.

But that was decades ago. You might think current wars aren't so bad: We've got drones and stuff. In that case, you're only thinking about the sides that are flying drones, rather than the sides being droned or involved in civil wars with no drones. Without citing figures too depressing even for this article, suffice it to say that there are still plenty of places to be born today where you can be sucked up into a war that had nothing to do with you. Hell, you could be sitting in your house in Belgium when a Soviet jet runs out of fuel and crashes directly into your house, making you a casualty of the Cold War you didn't even realize you were about to participate in.

Liberation
On the one hand, no boot camp assholes screaming at you because you can't do one push-up.
On the other hand, dead.

Or, you might just be born into a part of the world where you can be executed for who you are, like being in an ISIS-controlled territory and being gay. or being in the United States and not liking that new Star Wars movie. So don't be born in a place and time inhospitable to the kind of person you are.

Helpful hint: If you're poor, this may be basically all places and points in history.

This one is hard to follow, because there are a large number of things that seem safe that apparently aren't, like being around large amounts of corn. Did you know that in 2010, 51 people were victims of grain entrapment? Grain entrapment is a silly, silly name for when a large amount of grain acts like a merciless deathtrap from the hell dimension in Event Horizon.

When a worker goes into a grain bin to break up some clumps of corn, they can suddenly give way like a sink hole, sucking the worker down, down into the merciless corn. A human body takes seconds to sink and minutes to suffocate as the corn stifles any movement, like cement. The impact of the grain can cause blunt-force trauma. One body was recovered with a dislocated jaw.

United States Department of Labor
If anyone wants to reboot Children Of The Corn and make it truly scary, here's your tagline.

If, somehow, rescue workers happen to be near the grain silo for some highly unlikely reason, you're still not out of the woods. Rescue workers must be specially trained in grain rescues because of the toxic fumes, further grain avalanches, and because pulling (rather than digging) a body out of corn requires 900 pounds of force -- enough to tear your arm off.

Since there won't always be rescue specialists around, be sure to avoid all the things that you aren't aware are mortal threats. Keep in mind that basically anything can be a mortal threat.

When you go to a doctor, you're going to a medical expert you badly need. Unfortunately, current experts just aren't that great compared with the awesome array of things that can kill you. Why, even an otherwise successful treatment in a hospital can end in your death just because someone takes a tube out incorrectly. To prevent being killed by an oversight, CNN recommends that, while recuperating, you double-check all the work of your doctors and nurses. No statistics yet on how often second-guessing everything a doctor does causes them to choke you to death.

Say you manage to avoid the metaphorical landmines of disease, war, and unforeseeable accidents, as well as the literal land filled with deadly, deadly mines. You still have a 15 percent chance of being taken out by an act of (proof-there-is-no-)God.

I'm not saying there's nothing we can do to prolong our lives. Obviously, we can increase our chances of living longer by doing things like ignoring the trolls boycotting Ghostbusters. The point is that, even when we stack the odds in our favor as best we can, we still live in a world far more out of our control than we like to realize. Comets crash into planets, stars go nova, and films like The Force Awakens make a billion dollars in 12 days. Such is the randomness of the universe. Even when we do everything right, tons of people die for absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever.

DariuszSankowski/Pixabay
"So many dick pics unsent ... where did the years go?"

All closed systems can only increase in entropy over time. The fact that we exist and have become complex enough to be freaked out by our existence is an improbable and temporary state of affairs. The universe is primarily filled with dark matter and dark energy that lay an invisible hand on the universe observable to us. That's a pretty dead giveaway that we live in a Lovecraftian nightmare world. I wonder if there's a juice cleanse for that.

Aaron Kheifets is an occasionally mustachioed comedian, writer, and director. You are allowed to follow him on Twitter, watch his videos, and look at his website.

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